Description

Having co-led the research of the Forensic Oceanography project (2011-2021) and of the Border Forensics agency (since 2021), I have contributed to more than 10 investigations over 15 years, which remain publicly accessible online. Each one of them offers a probe into the evolution of Europe’s borders and the forms of harm they inflict onto the lives of migrants who dare transgress them. Together they have come to constitute as many entries of an archive of sorts - an archive of border violence. In this presentation, I will seek to consider the trajectory of investigations I have led through the prism of the archive, and explore some of the directions it conjures. In particular, I want to ask the following questions: ⁠How does our critical and oppositional investigative practice draw on and contest state archives? While the rich body of critical thought concerning archives has highlighted the simultaneous process of inclusion and exclusion they operate, does our own investigative practice not also involve a form of boundary work, which is shaped by difficult ethical and political choices and power relations ? Finally, if through our investigations we seek to intervene in the present with in the aim of contesting ongoing forms of border violence, what other temporalities of effects might the perspective of the archive help us be attuned to ? I will argue that thinking of our investigative practice as an archive opens a broader temporality that is particularly important to consider in relation to a form of violence – that of borders – which, just as slavery or colonialism, is enduring and it’s end illusive. 

Charles Heller is SNF Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Bern where he is leading the “Circumference of Violence research” project (2024-28) and Director of Research of the Border Forensics investigation agency. Prior to co-founding the Border Forensics agency, Heller co-directed the “Forensic Oceanography” project between 2011 and 2021 within the broader Forensic Architecture agency. As a researcher, filmmaker and human rights activist his work has a long-standing focus on the politics of migration, borders, mediation and the law within and at the borders of Europe.

The lecture will be followed by a panel debate with prof. Heller, members tbc, moderation by Robin Vandevoordt (CESSMIR, UGent).